What A Name Holds (And Why I Hate Mine)

It holds fourteen letters, five syllables, three words, and my shame. I’ve despised it my whole life, but it will always stick with me. There’s really no escaping it, no running away.

Sarah Chenhao Yi.

Just saying my full name, thinking it, hearing it makes me want to bury my head in my hands and block out all the noise. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, like the metallic tang of blood and the aftertaste of vomit. I hate it.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when I started disliking my name. It was probably around middle school, when I became aware that I was only one of a handful of Asians in my mainly white town. I hid my middle name from everyone, even my closest friends. I was ashamed of it, ashamed of how it looked, sounded, and the origins of it. All I wanted to do was fit in, which was pretty easy when the only person repressing me was myself. Being the minority in a sea of white faces, I was proud to be “white-washed.” As shallow as it sounds, I took pride in the thought of being the same as everyone else, even though I clearly wasn’t.

As much as I tried to detach myself from it, I couldn’t deny the fact that it carried my whole life in its hands. These three words contain every emotion that I’ve ever felt.

It carried my stress as I heard my parents scream it at me from the kitchen table after seeing the recent grade on my latest math test. It bore down on my shoulders, an elephant sitting on my chest. They scream again, and it rings in my ears. Their voices are muffled, as if I am swimming underwater. The sounds echo over and over again in my head.

It carries my Chinese; isn’t it obvious? It begs the question that everyone plagues me with:

What’s your name?

No, like your full name?

Like, the whole entire thing?

It’s a question that haunts me everywhere I go. It carries my heritage, my past; my dumplings and chopsticks and ni hao’s.

It holds my anxiety as I see it written across an email from my dream college. It carries tears that came from hours of stress and hard work, tears that stream down my face at 2 a.m. as I struggle to finish my projects and essays. It carried the fear that bubbled up when I heard my name over the intercom to head down to the office, the fear when I heard my father’s voice crackling over the phone, his tone somber and earnest as he said my name. The fear grabbed me by the throat as he continued to tell me, “Mom just went into surgery.” It gripped my stomach and stopped my heart.

It held my heart in two pieces after receiving that text, the text that ultimately disconnected me from the person that I felt the most love for. Reading my name through blurred vision from the tears over and over again on my phone screen, telling me that it wasn’t going to work out. It bore the constant heartache I felt for the next four months.

It carried the pain that stabbed me as my mom tried to explain to my grandfather that I’m his granddaughter.

Who?

His mind blinded by Alzheimer’s, he looked at me like I am a total stranger. He drawled my name out, like his tongue was feeling the word, tasting it.

I do not know her.

It carries the emptiness I feel every time I think about my old high school memories. Junior year, my favorite class, my favorite teacher, his legacy too short-lived. I can see my name, in his somewhat legible chicken scrawl, on my essay that would soon be published in the school magazine. It was in his class that I began to finally vocalize the dislike of my name.

But, over time, I realized it held more than my insecurities, shame, and overbearing emotions. It holds my pride. The pride I felt when I saw my name on the varsity rosters. It carried the pride I felt when I heard the crowd’s applause as I stood with my violin in my right hand and my self-confidence in my left.

It holds my happiness as my friends and I gasp from loss of breath after laughing over a joke I told that probably wasn’t that funny in the first place. It carried my pure joy as I saw it illuminating under the yellow highlight on the list of qualifying violinists for All States, a music festival that was only admissible through a rigorous audition.

Fear is probably not the most accurate word to use as a description of how I feel when I tell people my full name. It’s more of a baseless paranoia. I always expect taunting or mockery from whoever I tell, but it’s never happened. So in all honesty, the only reason I’m so secretive about it is all because of my own thinking. I don’t love my name. I still don’t really like it all that much, but I’ve begun to accept it. It shows people who I really am, even if they don’t see it in the same light that I do. There may be a day where I can truly come to love my name, but then again, that day may not even exist. It’s taken me 17 years to learn how to wear my name like a badge of honor instead of hiding it like a scar, and I know it will take me longer to fall in love with it by myself.

- A piece I published when I was a junior in high school